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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: With high profile leave campaigners including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove setting up a new campaign to deliver Brexit, Labour’s former Shadow Business Secretary, Chuka Umunna, is looking to hold them to the promises they made during the fierce referendum campaign and top of the list, of course is the pledge to give £350 million or maybe £100 million more each week to the National Health Service.  Well Mr Umunna joins me now from West London and a very good morning to you.  Well whether the money is going to go to the NHS eventually or not, the fact is as we all know we have left the EU and we are still paying in and will be doing so for several years.  

CHUKA UMUNNA: Well that’s right.  It obviously depends on when the Article 50, this famous provision of the European Union Treaty is invoked that starts a two year negotiation process but you are absolutely right, Dermot, there were a whole series of promises that were made by the Leave campaign and you’ve seen the successor organisation to it being launched today, Change Britain, which the Conservative supporting website, Conservative Home, has dubbed ‘continuity Vote Leave’.  You were right to mention the £350 million per week which we were promised would go to the NHS after we had left, of course they made a series of other promises too, not least that we would be able to continue trading with the European Union after we leave on the same beneficial terms that we trade with them now, they said that leaving would enable us to scrap VAT on household energy bills.  Of course importantly they also promised that EU citizens in the UK at the time of the referendum vote would be guaranteed the right to remain here in the UK, so there were a whole series of promises that were made that the organisation that I chair, Vote Leave Watch, is aiming to ensure people are held to account on.  I use that phrase very specifically because of course there will be some promises that the Leave campaign made that you wouldn’t necessarily want kept but I think it’s important, both from the point of view of the 48% of people who voted for us to stay in the EU but also for the 52% who voted for us to leave, that the promises upon which this campaign which won in the end were made, that people are held to account on that and scrutinised as to whether they delivered what they promised.

DM: Where are you on giving people another say when the smoke all clears, if it ever does clear, after all the negotiation is done and dusted, do you think there should be some form of vote?

CHUKA UMUNNA: Well I have to say, and this is going to disappoint some people who campaigned on the same side as me during the referendum campaign and as you know I came on your show many times making the case for us to stay as part of the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign.  I think we have to accept the result, we can’t because we have now lost complain about the rules under which the referendum was fought.  Of course there were misleading claims made and mispropagated but I think in the end what drove me to argue for us to stay in is because I didn’t like the divisive politics, setting up different groups against each other which I thought that some – and I use that word specifically – some in the Leave campaign kind of pedalled.  I don’t like that kind of politics of division and ultimately if we are to move forward as a country we have got to try and heal those divisions and bring people together so for that reason I am certainly not calling for a second referendum now.  In fact I have tried to get a deeper understanding of why those who voted to leave did vote to leave.  I represent a constituency, Streatham, which is in the Borough of Lambeth, which recorded the highest remain vote in the country.  I went during the summer and spent a day in the constituency of Boston and Skegness with the Conservative MP there and that is in an area that recorded the highest leave vote.  Now some people think that all those who voted to leave are somehow bigoted, prejudiced and racist and there is a small minority of people who might fit into that category but that isn’t really what I found in Boston, it is a lot more complex than that and the nice thing in a way is that the challenges and the reasons people voted to leave in Boston were the same challenges and difficulties that we have in Lambeth.  So there can be a meeting of minds there and I think now part of all of our job, and I do welcome the kind of overall tone of the article that was written in the Sun on Sunday today by Gisela Stewart who is heading up this new Change Britain organisation, is to work out how we can actually bring people together.  But that doesn’t mean that all these promises that were made during the referendum campaign by the Leave campaign which was victorious, it doesn’t mean those should be just discarded and forgotten.  I think there is a real opportunity here, Dermot, for the Prime Minister because I think she could if she was clever about this, she could prove both remain campaigners and leave campaigners wrong in the course of the Brexit negotiations.

DM: Mr Umunna, what about your own future and ambitions?  You are standing for Chairmanship of the Home Affairs Select Committee.  

CHUKA UMUNNA: I am, yes.  I was already a member of the committee, I am a member of the committee, what drove me to put myself forward as a member of the committee were the many issues that arise in my own constituency that the Home Affairs Select Committee looks on.  For example in Streatham we have one of the biggest African Caribbean populations in the country and yet you are more likely to be stopped and searched, to be charged, to be put through the criminal justice system if you of an African and Caribbean background and there are lots of other issues that we are looking at like female genital mutilation and prostitution which are also very, very prevalent in my constituency so that’s why I am putting myself, in part while I am putting myself forward to all MPs because the Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee is elected by all MPs from all sides of the House and I decided to put myself forward this week having been encouraged to do so by Members of Parliament, not just on the committee.  A lot of members of the committee wanted me to put myself forward and are supporting me but from people across the House.

DM: All right, I just want to get a word in there and examine the ‘in part’ bit because it’s said perhaps this is symbolic of the so-called big beasts of Labour, heading for other jobs because of what’s going on with the leadership.  We’ve got Andy Burnham going for Mayor of Manchester, Sadiq Khan already in London, are you looking for other ways to influence things?

CHUKA UMUNNA: Well I always said when I left the Shadow Cabinet in September last year and it was by mutual agreement of myself and Jeremy Corbyn the leader that it was probably better for me to support the cause from the back benches, I always said at that point that I never subscribed to the view that the only way to make a contribution in parliament is by being a front bencher, whether that’s on the government side or the opposition side.  I look at some of the fantastic work that colleagues have done over the years from the backbenches where they have actually changed laws and helped improve things.  Stella Creasy, the MP for Walthamstow, all her work trying to clamp down on legal loan sharks or the Deputy Leader of the Labour party Tom Watson, when he was on the back benches and the work he did to ensure we had better regulation of the media and the press.  I think both those things illustrate that the only way of making the contribution is not on the front bench and for us in the Labour party, once we do get the result of the ongoing leadership contest on the 24th September and hand’s up, I nominated Owen Smith and I hope he wins that contest, but afterwards we have all got to work out how we can move forward and work together to advance the Labour cause and most importantly, win the general election whenever that comes because ultimately that is why our party was set up.  We were not set up to be a protest group or protest movement and I do believe protest is important but we were set up to be a parliamentary operation looking to win power, to implement Labour’s values in office. Ultimately that has to be the goal, getting the Labour party elected and that requires a broad coalition, not just a small part of the left of the political spectrum but a broad coalition of support and sentiment spanning from the centre to the left under our first past the post electoral system which I actually would like to abolish and replace with a proportional representation system.  That is the only option open to us.

DM: You’ll abolish this programme.  We’re out of time, Mr Umunna thank you very much indeed. Chuka Umunna there in West London.